The Deliberate Kind

                  I was on my way to the store the other day. I got on the same tap-tap to Geral as a woman, and whom I am guessing was her son. She was impossibly skinny. Her skin and bones hugged so tightly together that I couldn't imagine blood being able to pass through. Her son was coughing, maybe from the dust, but more likely because he was pretty sick. He had the same eyes and demeanor as another boy I know. Beautiful and kind.
               Before we had gotten on the tap-tap, I had watched him leading his mother through the chaotic street, gently and protectively. I watched her smile needlessly at him as we took off, as she watched with happiness as he ate the krém she had bought for less than a quarter.
           I wanted to talk to them and ask them questions. Ask if they needed help. If he was sick. If she had eaten today. Where they were going.
           But I didn't want to embarrass them. I didn't want to be the one to take the smiles from their faces.

         
       
       But I realized that more than all the questions I wanted to ask, and things I wanted to do, I just wanted to know them. Know this boy with kind eyes who loves his mother so gingerly, know this woman who probably sacrifices most things for her son, who's love for him lies within the hum of her voice.
           I started dreaming in the depths of myself, dreaming not of doing something, but of becoming someone who knows people. Someone who helps people in such a way that it breaks racial barriers. Passes social codes. That embodies the mystery of love itself, and moves people not only towards living a better life, but to seeing Jesus in the very ones besides us. I started dreaming of Jesus. I started dreaming of friendship. But I also started to feel something, a deep urging inside of me to be asking God something.

                 
            There is something deeply wonderful about loving someone simply because you choose to.
            I think it is rather easy to feel compassion for a child living in an orphanage. I think it is easy to feel love for a child living in such a situation.

           







     I don't think it is easy to continue loving them when you see no end in sight for their suffering.

            When you start choosing to love them, you have to look into their suffering and love them right in the midst of it. Not when it's over. Not when they are healing. But when you know that the suffering will continue even through everything you do to love them.
           

 You take those sick babies into your home for a while, nurse them back to health, watch them heal and breathe and smile. You watch their bloated stomachs grow smaller, their eyes become more alert, their rashes fade. And then you have to take them back to the orphanage, knowing that they will just get sick again.
             You kiss away her tears, try to wish away the hollowness and hurt in her chest after she, the most hard-working, little girl you know, has just been unjustly screamed at, told she is worthless, and that she is going to be sent away. And you leave that day, knowing that as soon as you do, she will be left to take care of a newborn baby and work, still having worthless and ungrateful written all over her heart.
           
       You listen to the sounds of his voice as he whispers to you how badly he wants to leave, how trapped he feels, and how hopeless he sounds. And all you can do is listen, knowing there is no way out for him, not now, not yet.

               It's this eating away at your heart, almost can't bear it inside of you kind of love.
               It's heavy and strong and too much for your body. You get to feel a piece of God run through you, get to feel a glimpse of who and how He is. You get to grasp the edges of this mad, aching, wondrous love that He has for you.
              This love is deliberate. It sacrifices and suffers and chooses what is right. This love, it's kind. It is softly spoken. It is lovely. Warm. This love is choosing what's best for them and not you. This love is selfless. It makes you ache until you are removed entirely, and all there is, is this wanting for goodness in their lives.

               He kindly wrapped that withered hand in His palms. He spoke tenderly to the leper. He ached and cried out for Jerusalem. He suffered and sacrificed everything He had because of the unbearable love in Him. Dying wasn't best for Jesus. But he so longed for goodness for us that He did.

              I guess I never knew that faith is so tied up in love. That you can't have faith unless you love. That your faith can't be more unless you love more.  "And if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 1 Cor. 13:2  I have been asking for months and months for more faith, for him to increase my faith, when really, I can't have more faith without more love.

             I feel like there is much that is unknown for the future, of what exactly God will do next, of what exactly it is that He is asking of me.
           


 But I think of Nickenson, of Dada, of Mackenson, and I can't help but realize that Jesus hasn't  asked or pressured me to become a person who accomplishes sizable things or does something big or great. He hasn't created me to be that person. He's created me to love, Him and my neighbor. He tells us exactly how to love Him. By loving others. When Jesus asks Peter over and over if he loves Him, He tells him to feed his sheep. Near the end of Matthew, Jesus talks about how when we love someone in need, who's naked, hungry, sick, in prison...we are really loving Jesus himself.  
     

             I think God has been urging me to ask for more faith because of how unsure I have been feeling about the future. He's been telling me to ask for faith to make me realize that all of my decisions and choices I'm going to make for my future, should be for, and to love other people.
            He's been urging me to ask for faith so that I would love more. And that by loving more, I would have more faith.

 I think that is why I feel that friendship is so important. Friendship makes it impossible to walk away. I can walk away from my student, walk away from a child in an orphanage, walk away from a co-worker. But not when they are my friends. Friendship drags you into the kind of love that Jesus so longs for us to have for other people. It's the kind of love that won't let you walk away. It's the aching kind. The deliberate kind.
          Friendship does not only allow me to know people, it allows me to know God more. And I guess that's it really. To know God. To hear him speak, to watch Him do something incredible, to see Him move every time the world around you changes a little. Knowing God, I think that's all that most of us want. It's what I want.
         

Waiting to be Wanted

 

        "Courtney," Jimmy, our motorcycle driver says to me as we slump against the stairs of my house one night, after a long day. "I need to be reborn, like Nicodemus."
         He sounded different tonight, like he was thinking more clearly about the things he was struggling with, like he felt lighter, more free.
        We talked for a while before he left, and I wondered over my struggles in my own heart. My conversation with Jimmy echoed in my mind, but it was the way he talked that spoke words into my thoughts. I need to be reborn! He had said, but I kept thinking I need life! I need life! The plea resounded in my own heart. I need hope. I need freedom. I need life.

           God waits to be wanted.

                                           - Tozer

          For months I have been struggling with this feeling of  hardness in my heart. It was like my beating organ inside my ribs felt calloused and scarred. It felt shut of. 

          I hated writing, because it leaked into my words. I hated talking about it, because I felt embarrassed and ashamed.

         It's not that I felt apart from God. It's that I felt apart from His love. 

         I remember two years ago, I used to say things like many people do, like "break my heart for what breaks yours". I used to. But then He started doing it.

         I don't think we realize, at least I didn't, that when Jesus breaks your heart, it is supernaturally hurtful. And that there is no preparing for that kind of heartbreak.

        I knew this was why my heart had been hardened, had wrapped its thick guards around itself, and I knew that God was the only one who could undo the damage that closing myself off, had done.

        I had tried so hard to remember what the love of Jesus looked like in my life, but I was soon to learn, that sometimes, you have to watch God love someone else before you can remember anything about His love in your own.

        It started with Moses. Or should I say, Moyiz.

        A 2-day old baby was abandoned at the gate of the orphanage, and the director gave me the privilege of naming him. Ever since living at an orphanage two years ago, Moses was the one I had always identified with. I had clung to his story in hope, and had held on to the restorative way God changed his life. So Moses, Moyiz in Creole, was the first name in my mind, and when someone mentioned the name out loud, I knew it was the one.

       Over the next six weeks after he was abandoned, I watched God love and take care of him, this tiny little baby who wouldn't be able to know Him for years.

       Moyiz had nothing. No clothing, no milk, no diapers, no place to sleep. Nothing. And then God loved him. God loved him and provided funding for diapers. He loved him and brought us to a huge donation of formula. He loved him and found him a beautiful, wooden crib.

       Moyiz stayed at our house for a few weeks, and the entire time I watched as God loved him, through our hands, by His providence, and through Himself. God's love was chasing after this tiny little boy, just like he did in the beginning of Exodus.

         Two weeks ago some of Moses' siblings were brought to the orphanage. His brother Nickenson only spent a few days there before we decided to take him to the hospital, which turned to be too late for the day, so we took him to our home instead. And I was to watch again, as God loved someone in the walls of our home. 

         Nickenson was malnourished. A hard and big stomach stuck out under his tiny ribcage. He vomited his meals, and couldn't go to the bathroom. His hair was turning red, and big legs moved 

feebly beneath him as he walked. But more so, he was far away and his eyes were unfocused.
                                                             
         I don't know if I have ever been more excited or relieved to see a messy diaper in my life. Two weeks have passed and now Nickenson eats and plays and sleeps and goes to the bathroom. Even more, he smiles, he gets into trouble, he laughs and he cries.

        How wondrous it is to have watched Jesus begin to heal him with the markings of a love so gentle and near. 

       There are always those moments in your life. Moments when you don't want to say yes. Yes to loving the person who just stole something from a child in an orphanage, or having to miss your only brother's wedding, or only getting to see your family twice a year. 

       But getting to watch God move from this close?

       It is how I find my way through the tearing and aching of those moments. And other times, you don't have to find your way. Jesus leads you right to it.

         The Lord is near to the brokenhearted

and saves the crushed in spirit.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous

but the Lord delivers him from them all.

He keeps all his bones,

not one of them is broken.

                                              Psalm 34:18-20

            It had been half a year since I had seen my family and friends, and besides my flight getting cancelled and battling the usual sickness, it was beyond wonderful to be back home for a visit. More than anything though, God would answer my prayers and would refresh my spirit and would bring the freedom into my heart where a hardness had lived for a long time.

           On a Thursday evening drive through Pennsylvania, He did that. I still don't even know what had been burdening me so, but all I know is, that Thursday, he freed me of it, He drew near. I begged Him to un-harden my heart, and He delivered my afflicted heart.

            As thankful and ready as I was to get back to Haiti, the realization that I was saying goodbye to my culture and family for another six months weighed heavily in my being. I guess I always had it in my mind that leaving would get easier the more times you do it. 

           It does not.

    "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life." 

Matthew 19:29

              A missionary I had met in Costa Rica had reminded me of this verse once, telling me to cling to the promise of both hurt and goodness in these words of Jesus. I find myself doing that quite often.

            And so I miss all that I have to leave again and again. It is impossibly painful to have to say goodbye all the time. But there has been much goodness. There has been much received, and much life born. 

           It does not get easier. But I get closer. Closer to His heart.

           And that is every reason to say another heart wrenching goodbye, and step back into the strange calling of being a disciple here. And I find that when I obey, Jesus gives every reason to rejoice and to be inspired.

            Yvenante crawls onto my bed and lowers my music. Before I put my book down, the words are spilling from her mouth.

            "Courtney, I want to be closer to Jesus. I love him, but I want to love and know him even more." She looks at me, like she can't find the right words to explain. "I want my heart to change completely." I listened to her as she went on and on, her voice heavy with feelings of the Spirit, and the hunger to know Jesus deep-set in her eyes. "I want to pray more. I want to serve more."

       










I remember her praying for the first time with her own words. I remember giving her a Bible and us reading together late into each night.                          

               Olivier, another friend of mine who drives moto for us on occasion, wrote to me one night; Courtney, I want to live like you. The next day, I asked him to explain, and he explained that we, in our house, enjoy life together. That we do the smallest of things, and simply enjoy each of them. It's strange, that the smallest of things, like enjoying a walk together, can reveal deep love to someone else.

           I made Yvenante go on a walk with me so I could take pictures of her.

`

Because frankly, she's stunning.

        

          But the sun was setting, and Olivier, Nickenson, and Yvenante's daughter, Stesse walked ahead of us with Megan.
          I took Yvenante's hand and remember saying to her, "Look at all that God has done for us these past two years."

          She didn't have to say anything at all, and instead just smiled together at the rest of our strangely-formed family ahead of us.
           Our steps were slow coming back to the house, and my heart was full of hope from all of the beautiful, good things I could actually see God doing among us.







             I have watched God love Moyiz through his abandonment. I have watched God love Jimmy in his questioning. I have watched Him love Yvenante in her humity and in her desire. I have watched  God love Olivier and Nickenson and Stesse.
             I have watched Him love me.
             In my hardness, in my turmoil, in my warring against His love, He has loved me. He has loved me through my spiritual brokenness and has loved me despite my fighting against Him.
             Yes. How He has loved me so.

           I have never danced so much in my life. I have never wanted to dance this much at all. I've never wanted to move so much, to rejoice so entirely, to praise so completely, to worship so utterly, to live so readily. The dry season has ended, and there is much to rejoice in, much injustice to battle, and much loveliness to behold.
          I think about my talk with Jimmy and those resounding words beating inside of me. I need life. I need life. I need life.
         He has given it. He has instilled hope, he has won a war, and he has rebirthed wondrous love into a soul that is prone to wander.
         He waited to be wanted.
         And how much my soul does want.

Dreams and Things

         

         It had been a long day of teaching English when I received the late-night phone call that one of the children at the orphanage in Lizon needed pain medicine. We jumped on the back of our friend’s moto and started tunneling through the dark streets of Croix-des-Mision and Lizon. All you could see in the night were the silhouettes of people in flashing headlights, and the purple-gray clouds layering over the stars.

Somewhere in the midst of a rainy season sky, and the crowded dark streets on the back of a three-person motorcycle ride, Jesus gently and yet firmly encased my heart with his love. It was like in that moment, He was reminding me of the kind of God He is, the kinds of things in which He cares about, the things that He says matters.
Because God cares about Vladimir, the boy who is hurting in the orphanage. He matters to Him. He is important and so is his pain.
Jesus breaks in and makes me realize, that in this moment, I’m making the difference. I am making someone and something which would be forgotten, a priority. That even bringing tylenol to someone late night on a motorcycle is important and worthwhile. 
Sometimes it’s easy to skip over the passages where God restores a tool to an impoverished worker, or He provides a water source for a mistreated servant. 

Sometimes in light of big dreams and trying to do big things that seem impressive and important, I forget that Jesus finds the smallest of things so important. Maybe I just needed some stars and a motorcycle ride to remind me, or maybe Jesus was starting to remind me of something He had been trying to change in me for a long time now.

                 
                  Since March I have turned 21, and since then I have been busy. The kind of busy where you can’t even seem to find a day in your week just to breathe and process the other six days. 
                Teaching English classes. Making lesson plans. Advertising for the school to try and cover running costs. Trying to love 43 children in two orphanages. Trying to maintain a clean and better
environment for them to live in. Doing urban agriculture. Trying to support a family in the mountains of Zoranje. Trying to make it to the clinic each week to be an extra pair of hands. 
          The list goes on and on, and when there isn’t a routine, there is something else. Something else to be done, someone else to love and care for, some relationship that needs to be built. But this isn’t a post about busyness. This is a post of Jesus chasing after me in it all, and teaching me something he has been trying to instill in me for years.

             When people ask me questions, I think about them long after I answer them. I am a person who has no problem with reflecting, in processing through things, in loving to take the time out of life to do so. But since moving down here, I can’t answer the questions which I have always had the answers for, the questions in which I have never been unable to respond to.

I was having a meeting with the founder of one of the NGO’s that I have been partnering with here. Out of nowhere in the conversation, which is usually how I, myself, ask questions, she asked me what my dreams are. This is usually always a hard question for people, but it never has been for me. I have always known what my dreams are. I have always had those dreams that drive me, that inspire me, that push me towards something. Dreams are what I fight for and go for and live for.
But then she asked me, and I couldn’t believe I didn’t have the answer. 
It was then that I realized that all of my dreams had come true. I thought over all of my usual answers, all of the dreams I usually tell people, and realized God had already did it. He has said and answered and done. But I have never not known my dreams. And it scared me. If I didn't know my dreams, what would I be fighting for? What would I be longing for? What would I be working hardest for?
           I started trying to answer her question on my own. But I started seeking the answer in the wrong voices. I have been trying to figure out the very thing in which Jesus has already told me over and over again for years. I have been listening to the lies that Jesus already had to break through more than once. Lies that if I don't go to school and get a degree, if I don't work with an organization or ministry, if I don't have a role that can be defined, then I am worthless, I am not serving effectively, that I can't do anything worthwhile. That honestly, if I didn't pursue these things, I would be dreaming for nothing.

         


           Three months have passed since she asked me that question. Three months in which Jesus would answer me, in the simply annoying, and yet clearly beautiful way in which He does.

              It started with noticing them. The unnoticed ones. The ones who had such plain suffering written in their eyes. It began on Easter when I went to the hospital to visit my friend's mother. When her eyes lit up so bright at having someone come see her. Then as we were coming out and a boy carried his father in, and then as horrid anguish quaked through his body after the doctors told him he was already gone. It started with the blind man on the street. As a woman started beating on him

because  she ran into his walking stick.  It started with the too tiny baby crying in the clinic, feeling the weight of his skeleton frame in my hands. 
               Love has been hard lately. When you choose to love, you choose to hurt. But sometimes, the hurt becomes too much and you choose to harden your heart, you choose to block the intensity of God-love from your being and all the pain that comes with it. 

               I've been doing it. When little children you love so impossibly still continue to remain in the same seemingly hopeless situation, after you feel the heaviness of saying goodbye to someone, and knowing you will probably never see them again, and never know if they will be okay, when you love someone so intensely, thinking God has asked you to love them forever, and instead they are suddenly taken out of your life.. God-love just hurts, hurts more than every other kind of love.
              
               I have forgotten the dreams God has been breathing into my story because I have been shutting myself off to the sources where all of my dreams have been birthed. I have thrown up thick walls around my heart as a defense against such pain, but with losing the suffering, with losing the ache and turmoil, I have lost the love that produces wild and endless dreams for the world around me.
             
  But Jesus never leaves me to myself. 

He will tend his flock like a shepherd;

    he will gather the lambs in his arms;

he will carry them in his bosom,

    and gently lead those that are with young.

                                                       Isaiah 40:11

              Jesus is good. But even more than that, He is endearing, He is kind. He is ever trying to prove his over-arching love to me. He is funny and affectionate and makes me feel the unspeakable depths of my heart. He has been so gently placing His hands over my messy heart, making me feel at peace,

and full of hope and promise. The promise that He is doing something beautiful out of this weird, abstract life He has led me to live.

           He is faithful to the things He calls us to. And I have seen it. I have watched God being faithful, I have heard Him promise, and I have seen Him act on those promises. 

           There have been so many unfathomably beautiful things that He has made happen since we have been here. One of them is watching Him use the friendships we have built for something that has made my being rejoice in. Suddenly our Haitian friends are helping us scrub the fecies and grime from the orphanage rooms. It is my friend

Yvenante who is braiding all of the little girls hair and bringing them snacks. It is our motorcycle driver who spends money out of his own pocket for the family we are helping in the mountains. 

           
        This guy came to the English school one day looking for my friend. I heard his American accent and we got to talking, and he told me he had to come back to Haiti, that he got into drugs and ruined his life.
I told him you can never ruin your life, that it can always be restored. And I so desperately wanted him to believe it, for him to have hope again, for him to know Jesus, and to feel all of the good that He gives us.

        It was this weird, washing-over kind of feeling that ran into my spirit and somehow, this short encounter with this man made me remember. Made me remember who I am, who Jesus is trying to make me to be. 
    Someone who deeply and desperately cares about that one person who everyone has probably given up on already. Someone who holds the baby no one else notices. Someone who fights for the orphan living in a place of corruption. Someone who comes alongside of the single mother trying to find a way for a future.
I get so caught up in what the world tells me I need to be, and what I need to have. I have felt so smothered by so many voices pushing and saying and implying that without a specific role, a trade, a degree, something you’re really knowledgable in and super passionate about….that really, you aren’t useful.
It makes me feel not important, not helpful. It makes me feel embarrassed, and really, just pretty worthless.
I have wanted and still want these things though. I have wanted to be really good at something, or really passionate about something. I wanted Courtney to be good at agriculture or leading worship or helping medically or fixing things. I have so wanted that, but that’s not who God has been making me to be, what He has been writing and forming me to be.

I hate that I constantly try to form my own heart. I try to shove desires in there. Try to hate what I love, try to love things that I only like. I keep trying to change the person God keeps changing me into. I fight Him.
  But I want Him to win.
I want to be passionate about the things God has been pressing into my heart. I want to be humble. I want Jesus and Jesus alone to define who I am and my role in His kingdom. I want to stop caring about my life so much, and I want to care about that one other person. I want to stop, always. On the street, in the orphanage, in the school, in my home, in the mountains.
I just want to care. I want to love, and I want my soul to rest in knowing that as wildly undefined as those things are, that this is who I am, these are my dreams, and that it is enough.